The american dream in the 20 th century's literature

 

Emerging Superpower literature works

"The Gift Outright" (1942) by Robert Frost directly addresses the idea of establishing an American identity. "The Gift Outright" can be read as a brief synopsis of early American history. The first line sums up America's colonial roots: "The land was ours before we were the land's." In the poem, Frost contends that only after Americans fully gave themselves to this new land—by breaking free of ties to England and other European empires—could an American identity truly be formed. Frost describes this as "salvation in surrender" and suggests that the legacy of what it means to be an American has proven more valuable than the land on which the country was founded. Frost recited the poem from memory at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, after the aged poet was unable to read another poem he had written specifically for the occasion. Composed as the country entered World War II, and invoked amid Cold War anxiety twenty years later, the poem captures the feeling that the United States has a great destiny yet to fulfill.

• J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) presents Holden Caulfield, an anti-hero who has been the model for disaffected American youth for half a century. He is a bright young man who nonetheless finds himself failing academically. After he is expelled from prep school, he spends a few unchaperoned days in New York, killing time until his family expects him home for the Christmas holiday. He drifts into and out of the lives of several friends and acquaintances, making no meaningful connections with anyone except his younger sister Phoebe. He toys with grown-up ideas and situations and uses cynicism to mask his juvenile befuddlement about such adult things. He dismisses adulthood—and all the conventional notions of the American dream that accompany it—as phony.

The novel's frank language and discussion of sexuality and its anti-establishment tone created controversy in the idyllic prosperity of post-World War II America. The Catcher in the Rye became and remains one of the premier works defining the mid-century counterculture and its disillusionment with the American dream. Counterculture and disillusionment are also important themes in Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" (1955). Beginning with the line "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," the poem is a rambling, hallucinatory epic that covers topics such as the evils of industrialization and the role of the artist in modern society. Ultimately, it challenges the accepted notions of American traditions and ideals, using profane language, challenging religion, and depicting graphic sex. Shortly after the poem was published, the publisher was charged with indecency. Although "Howl" is often regarded primarily as a statement against conformity and the status quo, it also embodies the themes of searching for identity and meaning, much like Fitzgerald's more straightforward This Side of Paradise. In the mid-1960s, a generation raised in unprecedented prosperity and still searching for its own identity found itself embroiled in the Vietnam War. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is often cited as a literary response to events in Vietnam, though Vonnegut was writing of his personal experiences surrounding the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II. The central gimmick of the novel is that main character Billy Pilgrim has become "unstuck" in time and experiences scattered moments from throughout his life in no particular chronological order.